Huahine seagull
| Huahine seagull | ||||||||||||
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| Larus utunui | ||||||||||||
| Steadman , 2002 |
The Huahine gull ( Larus utunui ) is an extinct species of gull that breeded on Huahine Island in the Society Islands . Your closest living relative is probably the herring head gull ( Larus novaehollandiae , Syn . : Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae ). The type epithet is derived from the Tahitian words utu ("bird's beak ") and nui ("large").
features
The Huahine gull is known from twelve bones (ten different skeletal elements of two individuals) that were brought to light in the Fa'ahia archaeological site . The holotype includes a complete skull with the associated beak . The paratypes consist of a square leg, a lower jaw, the 3rd thoracic vertebra, a sternum, a wishbone, a coracoid, three humeri, a femur and a tibiotarsus. Eleven bones are believed to have come from an adult bird, the distal end of the humerus from a juvenile bird.
Systematics
After the herring head gull was transferred to the genus Chroicocephalus in 2005 , the Huahine gull should also belong to this genus.
die out
The Huahine gull is known only from subfossil bone material from the Holocene. Judging by the stratigraphic deposits, the species could have become extinct between 700 and 1200 AD. However, evidence of gull species on the Society Islands also appeared in later records. So described Carl Friedrich Bruch (1789-1857) in 1853 the gull species Gavia pomare , which was listed in 1857 as Larus pomarre by Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte for Tahiti and in 1859 as Larus pomare by George Robert Gray for Tahiti and the Marquesas. In his study of the holotype from the Natural History Museum in Mainz in the years 1878 and 1896 looked at Howard Saunders Larus pomarre as a juvenile specimen of Silver Gull and Larus Pomare as a synonym for the black-billed gull ( Larus bulleri , synonym: Chroicocephalus bulleri ). Carl Friedrich Bruch's entire museum collection was destroyed during the Second World War. However, a comparison of Bruch's drawing of the holotype of Gavia pomare with Larus utunui also showed that Gavia pomare's beak is too small to consider both species to be identical.
literature
- David William Steadman: A New Species Of Gull (Laridae: Larus) From An Archaeological Site On Huahine, Society Islands. In: Proceedings of The Biological Society of Washington Volume 115, 2002: pp. 1-17
Individual evidence
- ^ Pons JM, Hassanin, A., & Crochet PA (2005). Phylogenetic relationships within the Laridae (Charadriiformes: Aves) inferred from mitochondrial markers. Molecular phylogenetics and evolution 37 (3): pp. 686-699